(480.4769) WISE-Amsterdam -The British nuclear waste management organization Nirex will get one more year of life. On March 17 the former government blocked Nirex plans for underground storage of intermediate nuclear waste at the Sellafield site. Nirex has spent more than œ200 million ($327 million) investigating this site (see WISE NC 471.4665: UK Waste: NIREX plans rejected). It was speculated that Nirex would not survive or was forced to merge with its largest shareholder, British Nuclear Fuel, BNFL, which holds 40% of the shares. The Nirex board decided to maintain its research budget of œ30 million for one more year, without further job losses. Its future now depends on the plans of the new government for the storage of almost 300,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste. In the meantime a BNFL director, David Bonser, has been appointed as the new Nirex part-time chairman. Bonser had been responsible at BNFL for the construction of the THORP reprocessing plant and had worked with the BNFL since 1971. The new Nirex boss said Nirex wants to listen and learn from the past and to build a consensus next year with all the shareholders about the next steps. Other Nirex shareholders are the nuclear utilities and the Ministry of Defence. Environmentalists prefer the option of setting up a new, independent and publicly accountable organization. They see Bonser's appointment as a 'business as usual' measure which would not gain more public support. It is impossible to expect an independent approach from the BNFL, one of the largest producers of nuclear waste in Britain, they say. Bonser will also stay at the BNFL where he is responsible for nuclear waste management. The BNFL will surely seize this opportunity to influence Nirex policy, defending continued reprocessing as waste management. The Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC), which advises the government, has urged the new government in its 17th annual report to rethink waste and reprocessing policy and to decide if underground storage should still be the favored option.
BNFL wants billions of UK government.
At the same time, the BNFL is negotiating with the government, which is the BNFL's sole
shareholder, about the financing of its merger this fall with Magnox Electric (ME). ME owns
Britain's six operating and three closed Magnox reactors. Undiscounted back-end liabilities of the
ME Magnox plants are $29 billion, mainly for decommissioning and reprocessing; discounted
liabilities of ME stand at $13 billion. ME's balance sheet deficit is roughly $1 billion. Another
financial risk is the fact that ME also owns 46 tons of plutonium, reprocessed by the BNFL and
stored at BNFL's Sellafield reprocessing complex. This plutonium will be another financial risk for
the BNFL whether it will be stored or used in future. BNFL chances of being privatized will be
small when it merges with ME which has such a bad financial position. The BNFL wants to be
compensated financially for this merger. The former government decided that the BNFL and ME should
be merged to minimize costs. As the BNFL operates two Magnox stations, all Magnox plants would then
be owned by one compa- ny. At present plutonium is not being reused in Britain, but is still
accumulating as all British spent fuel is reprocessed at both the Magnox and the THORP reprocessing
plants at Sella- field. The RWMAC also suggests that spent fuel should be classified as radioactive
waste, if plutonium and uranium recovered by reprocessing will not be reused. This would seriously
undermine the present reprocessing policy.
Sources:
- Nature, 2 October 1997
- Nucleonics Week, 2 October 1997
- Nuclear Fuel, 22 September 1997
- Nuclear Free Local Authorities Bulletin, September 1997
Tel: +44-161-831 9108; Fax: +44-161-835 3645
E-mail: nfznsc@gn.apc.org
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